Did my sick husband have to die in jail?

Mountaineer Alan Mullin needed hospital treatment for mental illness but didn't get it. His widow Marion tells
Ed Douglas he was a danger only to himself and she fears more patients like him may commit suicide behind bars if the new Mental Health Bill becomes law

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday May 27 2007

Contrary to the article below, Scotland will not be covered by the Mental Health Bill currently passing through the Commons, which is destined to cover only England and Wales. Scotland has already introduced its own mental health legislation.

To Alan Mullin's family, the irony was cruel. Famous as one of Scotland's leading mountaineers, Mullin was now spending days and nights on end in front of a computer screen, his mind spinning out of control. Having taken on some of the toughest winter climbs in the world, he found himself exploring the peaks and depths of his own mind, looking for answers in cyberspace.

In the two-and-a-half years since Alan was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, his wife, Marion, felt they had managed to cope. But last January his condition worsened. Increasingly desperate, Marion Mullin reached out for help. The consequences of that decision will, she says, haunt her for the rest of her life.

Within days, Alan Mullin had hanged himself in his cell while on remand in Porterfield Prison in Inverness for a breach of the peace.

Marion Mullin is angry and bitter about the way her husband was treated. He was, she says, a danger only to himself. She wants an explanation for why a man who was delusional and had attempted suicide several times was in prison rather than in hospital.

She also fears that the new Mental Health Bill will make the situation of patients such as her husband worse, not better. The bill, which is being debated in parliament, is criticised by doctors and mental health charities for failing to meet the real needs of the mentally ill.

'It's not me to be in the limelight,' Marion Mullin says. 'I prefer to blend nicely into the background. But what happened to Alan must not happen to anyone else. I know they stick a lot of mentally ill people into prison, but this shouldn't have happened.'

Marion was grieving when she first met Alan at a New Year's Eve party in 1991. She had met her first husband, who, like Alan, was serving in the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets, when he was stationed in her native Germany. They had two children, Shirley and Steven, but on a tour of Northern Ireland he was killed in a helicopter crash. 'I was dragged out to join in [the party], and there was Alan, standing at the bar. He turned 19 that February. He was charming. There was a sparkle in him, full of life. I found that attractive in him, to be so young and yet so grown up.'

Marion was 10 years older than Alan with two young children, but somehow everybody clicked. Soon Alan and Marion had a son, Michael. 'It was good,' Shirley remembers. 'Having Alan was like having an older brother. I accepted him straight away.

'There's always been a lot of communication in this family. When Alan was happy, he was super-happy. He'd laugh a lot and do fun things.'

Alan's own background was much tougher. He had grown up in Saltcoats on the Ayrshire coast and, according to close climbing friend Kevin Thaw, 'referred to his upbringing all the time'.

'He told me if he hadn't have joined the army he'd have ended up in some squat with a needle hanging out of his arm at the bottom of the stack,' Thaw said.

The army offered Mullin the kind of physical challenge he was searching for, but it was typical of his contrary streak to choose an English regiment. His slight stature and biting wit got him into trouble. Before he met Marion, Mullin had picked up a severe knee injury playing football that needed surgery and would eventually stop him climbing. Later, stationed in South Georgia, he slipped a disc and needed another operation. Soon after, he was invalided out of the army.

By then, however, Mullin had discovered mountaineering during adventure training on South Georgia and was soon obsessed by it. The family settled in Conon Bridge, outside Inverness. Marion got a job as a home help and Alan began climbing full time. Early enthusiasm led to several dangerous scrapes, but experts who encountered him during this early phase all attest to his raw talent. In the mountains he found the kind of challenges he'd been looking for all his life.

Mullin did a string of exceptional climbs in the Cairngorms, breaking psychological boundaries in a way that inspired a new generation. He was photographed alone in atrocious weather battling his way up a new climb on Lochnagar as avalanches fell on either side of him. He called it Rolling Thunder. When more established climbers questioned his ethics in taking such big risks, his response was robust: 'I don't give a fuck.' Perceived as arrogant, Mullin's worsening mental health went unseen by most of the climbing community. 'He was driven by climbing,' Thaw says. 'It became an avenue for something else. He was impressive, as far as his boldness went.'

Thaw recalls how Mullin would tell people that other climbers hated him, particularly in his native Scotland. 'He liked that aspect, being an outsider. His demons were large. He wasn't always easy to be with and wasn't always trusting. But if he liked you immediately, you had his loyalty.'

Together, the two men travelled to Patagonia and climbed the west face of Mount Fitzroy, a daunting granite peak completed in the face of Patagonia's notorious storms. Climbing Fitzroy with a well-respected partner like Thaw confirmed Mullin's place in the mountaineering firmament. But just as he achieved success, the past came back to haunt him.

On a later trip to Patagonia, his old knee injury flared up. Despite finding the money for an operation at a specialist clinic in Sheffield, Mullin had to accept that his knee was ruined. 'That was pretty much the beginning of the downward spiral,' Thaw suggests. 'He suffered a big loss in not being able to use his body.'

Marion Mullin thinks with hindsight the seeds of her husband's illness had been there all along. 'He was always highly strung and would do crazy things, but that made him interesting. Sometimes I thought he should see somebody, because he was behaving dangerously. But the first time I heard of bipolar disorder was when he was diagnosed. To me he was just a live wire.'

Friends watched Mullin's withdrawal from the world with increasing concern. In 2004 Thaw got an email from him soon after his discharge from his first spell at New Craigs, Inverness's mental health hospital. 'I just have to try and learn to stop hating myself so badly, and then maybe I will get much better,' he wrote. 'I suppose the truth is just a point of view, but it is scary when you become so vacant as a soul.'

Mullin stopped taking the lithium he had been prescribed after researching its side effects, and tried to find new directions away from climbing. He trained as an alcohol counsellor, but quickly gave that up, later enrolling on an anthropology course at Aberdeen University. His periods of mania worsened and he talked about suicide.

For Marion, Alan Mullin's accelerating descent into mental illness was agonising to witness: 'He just withdrew into the office upstairs. He was constantly on the computer. He could stay up for days. He thought the aliens were coming to take us away, that the world was coming to an end. He even gave us dates. We sat here and thought, "Oh, no".'

In early January, after seeing her GP about Alan's deterioration, she came home from work to find their car gone. After calling the police, Marion went to look for her husband in all his favourite places. When she returned, the police had called back. Alan had stood in front of a car on the busy A9 road and had been admitted to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. 'Luckily the guy spotted him and managed to swerve,' Marion says.

Mullin spent eight days in the general hospital with a broken ankle and ribs, before returning as a voluntary patient to New Craigs. While there he attempted to cut his throat. By now, Marion was desperate for her husband to be sectioned. 'I was distressed,' she says. 'I phoned his psychiatrist and was told they were still assessing him.'

Mullin was back home by early February and in a good state of mind for a few days, but his delusions soon returned. 'He was Jesus,' Marion says. 'I was Mary Magdalene, Michael was God.' Early on 19 February, Mullin, who slept in a spare bedroom, told his wife that their son Michael shouldn't go to school. She noticed blood on the bedroom threshold and realised he had cut himself again.

'Alan was convinced that at 1pm a man would come to the house and shoot him in the back of the head. So he locked the back door and sat on the kitchen floor reciting verses from the Bible.' Marion managed to get Mullin into the bath and, to pacify him, agreed to his demand that she drink his blood. 'He said: "You need my DNA".' Then she quietly left with her son to fetch the police from nearby Dingwall, anxious at what Mullin might do if he heard her on the phone. 'I've regretted that ever since,' she says.

Marion Mullin claims that the police misread the situation. She says she wanted help in getting him to hospital before he hurt himself again. But 15 officers arrived at the house, five in riot gear, along with negotiators and dogs. 'I said to them: "For goodness sake, the man's got broken ribs, he's got a cast on." The police presence was totally unnecessary. It just fuelled his paranoia.'

After a five-hour siege, Mullin was arrested and kept in a police cell overnight and then remanded in custody for 30 days by Tain Sheriff Court. Marion and Alan's stepdaughter, Shirley, were baffled when the police returned to the house for clothes. They both assumed Alan would be readmitted to New Craigs. 'He was treated as a criminal when he was only in there as a danger to himself,' Shirley says. 'It's not like he'd hurt anyone else, or done anything criminal.'

Mullin spent the first week on suicide watch, but was then moved to a normal cell. Marion says Alan continued to talk of suicide. 'The day before he hung himself, he couldn't stop talking about it. Some days he would deal with it, but that Thursday he was so distressed.'

Next day, 9 March, while his cellmate was at a court appearance, Mullin hanged himself with the power cable from a radio. 'He was determined,' Marion says. Her decision to go to the police torments her still: 'I feel guilty about it. I know I did the right thing, because there was no way I could cope with him, not with Michael witnessing all that and making me drink his blood. Enough's enough. But the response was crazy.'

Mullin's death is now the subject of an investigation by the Northern Constabulary, which declined to comment before a fatal accident inquiry is held at the end of this year.

But Marion Mullin already feels that the system failed her family and is considering legal action. 'Alan should have been sectioned [to a secure mental health hospital]. If he had been sectioned, he'd still be alive. It baffles me that he wasn't. When he cut his throat, I thought that would be it.'

She fears that the government's Mental Health Bill, which received its second reading in April, will make things worse for patients like Alan. Legislation to extend forced treatment beyond hospital with Community Treatment Orders will, she believes, create a two-tier mental health system.

'I'm wondering if that will apply to people who can afford private health care? Will they stick well-off patients in a prison cell?'

Marion will keep the battle going. Not only for her family, but for all the others who are mentally ill and in a place where they shouldn't be: prison. Until they are cared for differently, Alan Mullin will not be the last person to kill himself in a locked cell when he should have been in a hospital.

Mental health in prison

· Almost 90 per cent of current British prisoners suffer from a diagnosed mental disorder. In the population as a whole, the figure is roughly 15 per cent.

· In 2002, nearly a third of admissions to prison health care centres were of inmates suffering poor mental health.

· Research suggests that most prisoners' mental health difficulties stem from previous experiences of violence or from sexual abuse at home.

· Women prisoners with mental disorders are more likely to harm themselves. Prison Service figures from 2005 showed that 597 out of every 1,000 female prisoners self-harm.

· Around 85 per cent of prisoners aged between 16 and 29 show signs of a personality disorder. This group is also more likely to attempt suicide than other inmates, according to research carried out among young offenders.